Your advertising message and why people buy from you

Working and dealing with B2B clients and receiving and reading a host of trade publications means I come across many marketing/selling messages throughout each working day.

Again, I must profess disappointment at the quality of advertising in the trade press. I’m not saying that these ads are all produced sloppily in-house, a majority are professionally-prepared by ad agencies or other professional communication practitioners. And, I put myself as guilty of these same transgressions in marketing communication.

I personally make no excuses as I usually just follow client instructions, especially when clients supply the copy. And, my only input is by way of layout. I refer to the ad message and what is set out in the ad brief. (However, when I am asked to develop a concept, it's another story.)

Many ads feature the client logo on top, with ad copy being either a company mission statement or an enumeration of products and services offered—the classic tombstone ad, or ”name, rank and serial number ad” as this is also known.

At best, these types of ads are of value only as subliminal reminders of an organisation’s presence in the marketplace. Unfortunately, at worse, these are not only ignored, but could be a way of proving to the market that the staff of the company concerned is just too busy to take time to prepare the right message or really is not interested in getting more customers.

Am I being too harsh?

Well, maybe. But consider this: when putting out a marketing communication, the point of view is not “I” or “we”, but should really be “you”. Yes, you the customer or prospective customer.

And, to really make an impact on the reader, the aspect certainly should be what’s in it for the reader.

Again, I refer to a promise to the reader. This is usually of one or more benefits the reader would get from buying or using the advertiser’s product or service.

When Dove sold its soap to the public, the company did not just offer a means of achieving personal hygiene, but one of “younger and smoother skin”. The emphasis was on the moisturiser in the soap.

The slant of the Volvo ads was on safety. The focus was not on the car itself, but on the safety shell, built into each vehicle. Volvo now has another slant, but the “Staying Alive” message is still at the back of my mind because it was memorable. And more importantly, the promise was safety, not just the driver, but the driver’s family who are in the vehicle with him (her).

(Funny though, that the safety cell was not invented by Volvo, though the company would certainly be remembered for relating this with its cars. It was developed by Mercedes Benz, who did not patent the technology as the management of the company wanted to share this with the rest of the world.)

I digress, but you get my drift. The principal consideration is not that you as a marketer are there put a message across because you love your organisation or your job, it’s because you as a marketer exist because of your customers. No customers, no you.

And, your customer doesn’t care about your company, your mission statement, your product (or service) offering, but on what your company can do for him or her. Yes, what’s in it for me (the customer).

So, the point of view and the message is a promise of something that must just be too good to pass up.

And, put simply the more enticing the message the greater the interest the reader will have to go beyond the headline, read through the body copy and then contact you for more details.

Writing about features and benefits, there's a difference

Remember the old “features” and “benefits”. I’ve been involved with these two aspects of many a product over more years than I care to remember. (In an earlier life as a sales representative, the product features and benefits were drummed to us by the powers that be in every product training session.)

I note that in a number of ads, I’ve come across in the last few years and up to the present, product features are prominently covered in the body copy of print ads. So much so, that the actual benefits that accrue from those features are many times forgotten. Or, left to the reader to work out.

So, what am I getting at. It’s simply this: to sell product, one has to concentrate on benefits, not features. It’s benefits that sell, not the features.

Features are the different aspects that describe the product. This may be the bells and whistles, which many a salesperson, has more than once been so enamoured of that the benefits of these are lost in the telling. Or, they may be the nuts and bolts of a product.

Let’s stick to print ads, for the purpose of this post. Using a personal computer as an example, today, we see many ads pushing dual core processors, and the amount of RAM found in the units being promoted.

This is akin to saying that this car has so many horsepower (kilowatts of power if we must think metric), or so many cylinders and so on.

This is alright, if we are preparing a specification from which we will be supplying a product. But, as we are trying to sell, we need to highlight benefits. Yes, the old what’s in it for the buyer. What will a buyer or eventual user get from the feature you just highlighted?

Taking the PC example again, more RAM, means that it is a lot easier working a particular computer. In the days of memory measured in kilobytes, rather megabytes (really gigabytes today), this meant the user had to shut down an application before switching to another.

Yes, dear reader, this used to be the case. Our younger readers may not appreciate this, but that was how it was only some 10 years ago.

Anyway, I digress. Multi-tasking is now a given. But, if you were trying to sell a computer with only 512 Mbytes of RAM, what chance have you against your opposition’s offering 2 GB.

But, instead of pointing out the 2 GB, we can highlight the benefit of greater productivity, because of greater RAM. This means in the end, more time to do other things, or more dollars in the bottom line.

That’s right. That is what is in it for the prospective buyer (which is what the reader is).

So, when preparing your next ad, don’t forget to stress benefits, rather than features. If you do have to enumerate features, don’t forget to explain just what this means to the reader. That’t right, what the benefit of the feature is to that person.

"How to" write a headline for a print ad

Link

Previously, I lamented the waste of an ad for not using a headline. Here I would like to give the reader some pointers on how to write headlines. Specifically using the words "How to".

A "How-to" headline is one of the most effective ones there is. Like the word "free", these words have a strong attraction.

In the Web 2.0 world, users of the net go to this resource looking for information. How to do something, build something, improve something, save something or whatever something, that's one of the reasons people seek out information on the net.

Well, just imagine the advertiser sets out some information to teach the reader "how-to" do something smartly, if you as a reader, came across those words on a subject you were interested in, you'd certainly read on. Right?

You bet.

Hence, we have a headline that gets attention. That's the number one objective of a headline.

If you remember the old formula (AIDA) of ad preparation, which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Before we develop a reader's interest, we have the catch his/her attention. That's the headline's job.

If we get that, then chances are the reader will go through the rest of the ad copy.

You bet.

Well, I see that you're getting my drift.

And, that's just one type of headline one can use in print advertising. Remember what I said about promise. Again I go back to Samuel Johnson, who said "Promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement". That is what a headline has to do for your ad. Make a promise.

A how-to headline promises to teach the reader just how to do what is covered in the headline.

And, chances are curiosity will lead the reader through the body copy and if interested enough and persuaded to action by the advertisement, contact the advertiser.

And, the headlines's job is done.